In Her Time... A Guest Blog From Poet David Reaume Demola

An old woman once told me that life
was so much more simple,
in her time.

Because all she ever learned was reception,
working the front desk for a local businessman,
welcoming guests into the house of her husband –

She said she can’t remember when it all shifted.
It feels like she woke up one morning and the world was this:

Her daughters wanted more from their existence
they grew up with college educations,
struggled to climb career paths while she laughed at them

Because all she ever learned was reception –
at the hand of her husband
to teach her a lesson
to never do what he told her not to, again
because even if it doesn’t make sense
she was taught by his methods never to question

He said “just sit there, until it’s time to clean the home,
it’s time to fuck me,
or it’s time to feed our children.”

And her daughters don’t understand why she let him do it, back when he was alive.
And she tells me she explained it’s because she had asked for it
because she knew his temper
but still disobeyed him once in awhile.
And she tells me, now that they’ve grown older,
her daughters have learned to resent her
and now she wishes they would talk to her
so she could apologize for taking his abuse for so long.

So she can apologize
to them
For all the times she let his hand hit her.

She wants to tell them it hurts her more
than every fist he ever put to her
knowing that her daughters don’t even respect her.

And I don’t think they remember
that women’s suffrage is still a young institution in this country
and the societal right for a husband to lay hands on his wife
is still held
in places that don’t have women’s shelters.

And this old woman tells me
she would have hated to have her daughters’ sense of freedom, in her time.

She’s not sure if she could have survived.
______

A lot of my writing (if I had to put it into a percentage, I’d say 90%) comes from personal experience. This particular piece comes from a phone call I took while doing tech support for Apple (there’s a lot of downtime while devices turn off and on, where you’re encouraged to converse with the customers).

On my website, http://8-bitreality.com, there is a good deal of first drafts for poems. I tend to save the finished drafts for publication (I have two books, so far) – but I love having a repertory of drafts so people can see the history of a poem, and how it changed (or didn’t change).

Also, I house an ongoing case study-style examination of Major Depression, which has actually saved a few lives and helped a few people understand this very quixotic, often ill-portrayed condition. – David